


Takes All Sorts...

by capuaisburning



Series: Arkham Dreaming [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Arkham Asylum, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-17 00:17:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3508010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capuaisburning/pseuds/capuaisburning





	Takes All Sorts...

MAX.

The glowering sky was small comfort, but it was fractionally easier on the eye than the Asylum grounds that sprawled around me, so I elected to stare fixedly at it anyway. The clouds whirled in an agitated dance, and a cold, stiff wind raked at my back through the fabric of my Asylum-issue shift. It felt like a storm front was announcing its arrival in Gotham Bay.

The usual asylum chatter swirled around me, mingling with the brittle rustling of the undergrowth. Low, threatening murmours. Doggerel chanted in hoarse, fevered voices. Animalistic yaps and barks, the occasional truncated shriek or shrill burst of laughter.

I had come to hate exercise hour.

A hand settled on my shoulder, making me flinch.

“Easy there, my friend,” Harry said pleasantly. One of the better orderlies.

Some of the tension wept out of my body, setting off little lightning spits of pain in the cramping muscles of my back and shoulders. I forced myself to twist my head away from the sky and meet Harry’s placid, smiling gaze.

“You going to give me a dressing down for not socializing, Hal?” I said, grimacing at how broken and feeble my voice sounded to my own ears.

“Hey, it’s not my job to boss you around, despite what you guys believe,” he said, “I’m just thinking that this is a good opportunity to stretch your legs and explore. I’d be happy to see you make the most of it.”

I gave him a slight smile, in spite of myself. “I’ve been here a good long while, Harry. There isn’t an inch of it I haven’t tramped across a hundred times over. Unless there’s some secret cave of wonders stashed around here that I don’t know about, I’d say my exploring days are done.”

His fresh young face attempted to arrange itself into a sombre expression. “Sounds like a man who’s given up on things to me, pal.”

“Promoting yourself to good old Jeremiah’s team now?” I teased him. “Thought you needed at least a few years in psychiatry school before you start rummaging around in other people’s angst.”

He rolled his eyes. “They can keep it, frankly. Not that it doesn’t do a lot of folks a hell of a lot of good,” he added, quickly, “but I’m more of a friendly concern guy than a Neuro-Cognitive-Repression, tell-me-what-happened-to-your-teddy-bear kind of guy.”

I felt my smile strengthen. “You’re wasted on this place, my friend.”

“In all seriousness, is there anything you want to talk about? You’ve been pretty withdrawn the past couple of weeks, after all that progress you seemed to be making with Doctor Young.”

I looked away from him, out over the sweep of the Asylum lawns where scores of inmates tottered in aimless, nonsensical patterns.

“Nothing specific. It’s just this place. It’s just everything.” I sighed. “I know it was a delusion, believe me. But there was a time when I honestly believed, right down to my very core, that I was the King of the Gods. The entire city was my playground, and there was no adventure I could conceive too outrageous to be attempted.” I glanced wryly at him. “It was all very unethical of course, I appreciate that now. There were a fair few…bad days. But there were times when it was…glorious, when I was almost drunk with it.”

He nodded, but now he was performing sympathy, humouring the patient. He didn’t understand.

“And now,” I went on, “I’m just another lonely madman. I’ve been here for two-and-a-half years now, at least for this stretch. I haven’t relapsed in a year. I should feel happy, relieved. But I just feel hollow. I guess I feel like a god brought down to being a man. I don’t think I have any adventures left.”

HARVEY.

The kid was doing a poor job of concealing how spooked he was. Sure, he kept his voice even and he went through the customary protocols briskly enough. But the hands that scooped up my meal tray were unsteady, with a slight sheen of sweat on the knuckles. Not to mention the exaggerated way he was forcing himself to look at me, as if battling the instinct to let his eyes shy away from my face.

The gentler side of me, the one that Gilda used to know, felt a muffled twinge of sympathy for the boy. Poor education, scant prospects. This thankless job was a chance to wear a uniform, earn some self-respect doing society’s grunt work for it. Arkham guards rarely wanted to be here, and the ones that resisted becoming petty despots or corrupt weasels deserved recognition for their grim, repetitive and thankless work. For all I knew, if this boy stuck around long enough he could become the next Aaron Cash, the sort of man who’d throw his body against the gates of Hell to hold the demons inside, well away from decent people.

Of course the other side of me just saw weakness. Weakness in a starchy guard’s uniform, despised symbol of civilization and its hundred miserable restraints. This was the side of me that made my fingers itch and twitch, testing a strangler’s grip against the air. I felt its black hunger boiling at the back of my skull, squirming for release. 

I shushed it. Not time yet. Those knife-edge decisions of life and death would have to wait, at least until I took my coin back.

“Say guard,” I ventured, trying to keep my voice as neutral and nonthreatening as possible. No use, still sounded guttural and menacing. “Any word on when I’m getting out of segregation? It’s been weeks since that…incident.”

He glared at me, cheeks pale with nervous outrage. “Larry still hasn’t recovered from that ‘incident’, Mr. Dent. Till he does, you stay in shackles.”

I turned my left eye on him, thoughtfully. He winced. “I mean…those were Doctor Arkham’s orders, at least.”

I rattled my restraints and chuckled. “Fair enough.”

He was clearly poised to leave. I grunted and plucked a folded slip of paper from the floor beside me, being careful to use my right hand. “Hey, guard. I want to ask you a very small favour.”

I showed him the right side of my face and half-smiled in response to his wary look.

“I’m not trying to corrupt you, son. I just want you to deliver this note for me. Just put it in your pocket and hand it over when you get the chance, that’s all. In return, I’ll feel a lot more motivated to be on good behaviour for a while. A lot more Dent and a lot less Face. Good news for poor old Larry, eh?”

He hesitated, half-reaching. Weaker than Arnold Wesker’s spine, this one.

I flourished the note. “Come on, my friend! I promise I’ll remember it. I may be a freak, but I appreciate it when someone does me a good turn.”

He asked who it was for. He blanched when I told him, but took it anyway, albeit handling it like it was soaked in Joker-venom. I’m not anyone’s idea of a master manipulator, but these chumps are always so pitifully easy to control. To think the public wonders where me and my ilk manage to get our recruits from!

After the weakling left, I leaned back against the cell wall, turning over matters in my mind. First order of business was getting my coin back, after Jeremiah and that bitch-queen of a new Doctor somehow worked up the nerve to take it from me. Hopefully that was now being dealt with.

Next, of course, would be settling accounts with the slime who’d caused me to lose my coin in the first place.

Scarecrow, you rat-bastard, I thought. I helped you, trusted you, repressed my natural instinct to strangle you, and you abandoned me like some second-string amateur the moment you got what you wanted. All this time in solitary, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to think up so very, very many ways to ruin you, break you, see your ridiculous stick-figure body contorted and sobbing for forgiveness at my feet.

I just don’t know which method I’m going to use yet. That’s for the coin to decide.

ENIGMA.

A pencil. It was a pencil, half-worn to splinters. The Riddler stared dully at it as his senses slowly unscrambled themselves. It was night, and the forlorn little pencil was just a chance point of focus amongst the litter of discarded stationary, disassembled gadgets and general detritus that smothered his worktable.

A winged cherub bobbed from the ceiling, a spindly puppet that spun in creaking circles above Edward Nygma’s weary head, dripping spatters of green from the splotches of emerald paint daubed roughly over its curves. Nygma dazedly wondered where the freakish thing had come from.

The floor wax squeaked as he rolled his chair back, memory finally returning. He had been cooped in his hideout for days, obscure narcotics fuelling a binge in sleep-defying plotting and preparation. His output had clearly been prodigious, but at a price in focus, not to mention other…side effects. 

He’d clearly had some grand project on his mind, but what was it, exactly? The mayhem that surrounded him would take hours to decipher, but the urge was building up inside him again, his brain sizzling with a thousand twisted ideas, driving him on, forcing him to toil and scheme until he reached that blissful moment of supremacy that hovered on the edge of his dreams. 

Not for the first time, he cursed the name of Batman, as he snatched up his pencil and resumed work.


End file.
